You already know how your process works — you built it. This page is only about the how of automating it: where your questions live, what you actually do during a session, where the answers go, how the scores get calculated, and how the documents come back to you.
Nothing about how you work changes. The typing, counting and reformatting is what goes away.
This is the screen you would be looking at while you are on the phone with a client. Read the question aloud, click what they say, move on. Try it — press 1 to 5 on your keyboard, or click.
The demo below runs your thirteen-question review, because that is the set I had in front of me. The same screen runs your hundred-question set without a single change — the questions are information the system reads, not something built into it. Adding yours is an afternoon of careful typing, not a rebuild.
And your hundred questions are what I would build first, because that is where the time actually goes. A hundred questions answered by hand, then a hundred scored by hand, before you can go back to the client with anything at all. That gap between finishing the session and having something to hand them is the part worth removing first.
Every organization gets a file. Inside it is every session you have ever run with them, each with its date and its scores. This is what makes the ninety-day comparison possible — it is just two sessions sitting next to each other.
| Organization | Session | Date | Questions | Overall | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Life Management Centers | Training review | Apr 2026 | 13 | — | Evaluation, diagnostic, plan |
| Life Management Centers | Implementation baseline | Aug 2026 | 100 | — | — |
| Life Management Centers | Day-90 re-measure | Nov 2026 | 100 | — | Progress comparison |
| Next client | Training review | — | 13 | — | — |
The greyed rows have not happened yet. They are there to show that the same template serves every client and every repeat session, with no rebuilding.
Stage four is the only stage I cannot build on my own. Everything else is plumbing I have done many times. The scoring is yours.
I tried to reproduce your pillar scores from the thirteen survey answers alone and could not — working only from those answers I get numbers that come out almost flat, while yours run from 82 to 88 with a clear order to them. That tells me your scoring draws on things the answer sheet does not contain: the comments, what you observed in the room, what you already knew about that board, and your own judgment.
I am not asking you to change any of it. I am asking you to describe it, so it can be written down once and then applied automatically forever after. Once it is written down, the session you just clicked through produces your scores by itself.
And if part of it should stay judgment, that is a good answer too — we build those as fields you fill in, and the software does the rest around them.
The practical difference. Today the counting, the grid, the percentages and the reformatting sit between you and the finished documents. Automated, the session ends and the drafts are already waiting. Your time moves to the part only you can do — reading the organization and advising it.
The real answer, not the diagram version.
It lives in the cloud, in accounts opened in your name. You reach it from any browser — your laptop, a hotel computer, your phone in a car park before a board meeting. Nothing is installed. Nothing is tied to one machine. You can export everything you own at any time, and if you ever stopped working with me you would keep all of it.
Why not just on your computer? It is genuinely possible, and there are three reasons I would talk you out of it.
You could not send a board member a link to answer on their own. It would only work at that one desk, so no working from a client's office. And a single hard-drive failure would take every client file you have with it — including the ones you are contractually holding for other people.
This is the part worth understanding, because it means you are not locked into anyone's ecosystem. Each job can be chosen separately and swapped later.
One recommendation rather than a menu. You are hiring me to make this call, not to hand you a comparison chart.
| Job | What I would use | Cost to you |
|---|---|---|
| The screen you use | A web page built for this, like the one you just clicked through | included |
| Where answers are kept | Supabase — a hosted database | $0, then $25/mo once live |
| What makes the documents | Built in. Nothing extra to buy or learn | included |
| Publishing it | Cloudflare Pages | $0 — business use permitted |
Prices checked August 2026. Supabase free tier, $25/month once it needs to stay always-on; Cloudflare Pages free plan explicitly permits commercial use. Figures move; these are current as of this week.
Why this and not something else.
It is the stack I build on every day. This is what I already work in — web front ends, hosted databases, document generation, deployed on Cloudflare. I am not proposing something I would be learning at your expense, and there is no license I would need to buy to start. That matters more than it sounds: the fastest, safest build is always the one your builder has already done several times.
The session screen has to feel right at conversation pace. You are on the phone reading a question aloud and clicking as they answer. Off-the-shelf form products are built for someone sitting alone filling in a survey, and they feel like it. This is the one piece worth building rather than buying, because it is the piece you touch every single time.
Your documents come out in Word, in your formatting, with nothing extra to buy. Assembled from off-the-shelf parts you would pay a separate monthly fee to a document service and accept whatever formatting it hands you. Built this way, that step is included and matches your templates.
And it is the cheapest thing to keep alive — twenty-five dollars a month, total, with no per-seat charge as you grow.
Everything is in your name. The accounts, the data, the documents. Not mine, not my company's. You hold the passwords. I work inside your accounts rather than holding your work inside mine.
The honest caveat: this depends on a developer. If I am ever unavailable, you need someone who can pick it up. I handle that by keeping the build deliberately simple and ordinary, writing down how it works as I go, and making sure everything sits in your accounts. There is a no-code way to assemble most of this from off-the-shelf products instead — slower in the moment, more expensive monthly, but maintainable by any freelancer. If never depending on one person matters more to you than the session screen feeling right, tell me and I will build it that way. I am recommending this one because it fits how you actually deliver.
Building it is one number. Keeping it breathing is a different, much smaller one — and that is the one that matters to you long-term.
| What | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Hosting — Cloudflare Pages | $0 — their free plan permits business use |
| Database — Supabase | $0 while building, then $25 |
| Document generation | $0 — built in, no service to subscribe to |
| Total to keep it alive | $25 a month |
If you ever stopped paying, the system would sleep and your data would stay exportable — nothing gets deleted for non-payment, and you can pull everything down as spreadsheets and Word files at any time and keep it forever.
Does it need me to stay running? No — and that is by design. Once built, nothing changes unless someone changes it. There is no monthly maintenance ritual. The realistic support pattern is what a plumber calls break-fix: it runs on its own, and you call when you want something changed — a question reworded, a new document template, a tweak to the scoring.
Two promises that make that safe for you: everything sits in your accounts, so nothing about your business is hostage to my availability. And the build is documented as we go, so any competent person could pick it up cold. You are buying a system, not a dependency.
I checked, because you should not be anyone's experiment.
What you do — a structured question set completed by a board, scored into a capacity report, followed by a consulting engagement — is an established category with working products in it. The best-known is TCC Group's Core Capacity Assessment Tool: 146 questions, completed online by leaders and board members, scored into a report across nearly forty categories. It has run for years and consultants build whole practices on it. A research-based cousin called iCAT does the same job, and the Ford Foundation publishes a free facilitated version.
Why this is good news and not competition: those tools prove the machine works — boards will complete online assessments, the scoring holds up, consultants profitably run businesses on exactly this shape. But every one of them scores someone else's generic framework. Yours scores Power5SynrG. The category validates the machine; your five pillars stay the product. When it is built, you will have what CCAT's owners have — except branded to your method and owned by you.
The same is true one level down, in the parts. The question-and-answer engine I would build on is an open-source library called SurveyJS — free for commercial use, built specifically for scored assessments, run by thousands of organizations with the data kept in their own database. The document generation, the client files, the sign-in: all standard, proven parts. Nothing in this build would be invented. It is assembly of things with years of production use behind them — which is exactly what makes it supportable on a break-fix basis rather than needing a full-time engineer.
Step by step, with honest effort against each piece.
Nothing is installed on your computer, and nothing is built on it. Think of it like online banking: your bank did not put software on your laptop. You go to a web address, sign in, and your information is held safely on their side. This works the same way — except the accounts holding it are yours, not a bank's.
The work happens on my machine, and the finished thing gets published to a rented server. You get a web address and a password. That is the whole of your involvement with the technology.
The session screen you just clicked through is not a mock-up. It is the real thing, already written. What it cannot do yet is remember anything — refresh the page and your answers are gone. Most of the list below is about giving it a memory.
I would build it in two stages, and the first stage is your hundred questions — because that is the slowest thing you own, and it is slow twice: once while somebody works through all hundred, and again while you score all hundred before you can go back to the client.
| Day | Stage one — your hundred questions, running |
|---|---|
| 1 | Your hundred questions loaded in — grouped by pillar, answer choices set to match how you already ask them |
| 2 | Somewhere to save, and the ability to stop halfway and pick up where you left off. A hundred questions does not always fit in one call |
| 3 | Your client list and a sign-in, so it is yours and you can reopen any organization and any past session |
| 4 | Getting your answers back out — a spreadsheet and a printable summary, grouped by pillar. This is what you would score from |
| 5 | Published, in your accounts, at your own web address — then a dry run, the two of us, before it ever touches a client |
| 6 | Held back on purpose, for whatever the dry run turns up |
Six working days from the moment I have your questions. I would tell you ten business days, because a date I beat is worth more to you than a date I explain.
At the end of it you can sit on a call, read a hundred questions off a screen, click as they answer, stop and resume if the call runs out of time, and have every response saved under that organization's name before you hang up. No grid to type up afterwards.
Stage one does not need your scoring, and that is deliberate. It captures answers; it does not score them. Which means we can start the moment you send me the questions, and the conversation about how your scoring works can take as long as it needs to take without holding anything up.
You would score that first run exactly the way you do today — but from a clean spreadsheet instead of a stack of paper. Then stage two encodes your scoring so you never do it by hand again.
Which means a client starting next week is not a reason to wait. It is the reason to start.
What “done” means for stage one — because half-built helps nobody. If you never bought stage two, stage one would still be a complete, working replacement for the paper. Specifically, all of this works end to end or stage one is not finished:
✓ Sign in from any device · ✓ Add an organization · ✓ Start a session · ✓ Work through all hundred questions · ✓ Type notes as they talk · ✓ Stop and resume later · ✓ Finish and see every answer grouped by pillar · ✓ Export a spreadsheet and a printable summary · ✓ Reopen that session next month · ✓ Run a second session for the same organization
The one thing it will not do is score for you. That is stage two, and it waits on you rather than on me.
| Stage two — the rest of the engine | Effort | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your scoring, written down — then applied automatically to every session forever after. Blocked until you describe it. | 1–2 days |
| 2 | The four documents — your evaluation, diagnostic and plan rebuilt as templates that fill themselves in. The biggest single piece, because matching your formatting exactly takes care. | 3–4 days |
| 3 | Send-a-link mode — a private link per board member, for when you are not doing it live. | 1 day |
| 4 | The day-ninety comparison — two sessions side by side, and the progress report writes itself. | 1 day |
Both stages together are roughly two to three weeks of my time, spread across calendar weeks rather than worked straight through. Stage two runs while you are using stage one, so nothing sits idle waiting on me.
Could it be quicker? Assembling it from off-the-shelf no-code products instead would be closer to two or three days, because that is configuring rather than building. You would trade the session screen feeling right, and pay more every month for the privilege. I would not recommend it for you, but it exists and you should know it exists.